A STRANGE DREAM.
My mother and I stopped up talking until very late on this night. The
future was not mentioned; all our talk was of the past. My mother
recalled the reminiscences of her younger days, and dwelt upon them
with affection. She drew pictures of her home when she was a girl, and
told me a great deal concerning her parents, and especially concerning
my grandmother, of whom my own impressions were so vivid. As though
she were living her life over again, she travelled from those days
gradually to the day upon which she first saw my father, and in tender
tones related many incidents of their courtship which I had never
before heard. She required a great deal of coaxing before she would
speak of her courting days, but I led her on artfully from one thing
to another, and listened to her with delight. On such occasions as
this my mother seemed to grow twenty years younger; her face grew
fresher, rounder, and in her eyes the soft light of youth lived again.
Then came the description of her wedding-day, and she laughed or grew
pensive as she recalled the names of those who were present, stopping
occasionally, until I said, 'Yes, mother, and then,'--upon which she
took up my words, saying, 'And then, my dear,'--and proceeded with her
descriptions. When, in the course of her narration, I came into the
world, I was able to take a larger share in the conversation, and I
added my experience to hers. We were by turns grave and merry,
according to the nature of our reminiscences. My grandmother's
peculiarities, her death, the search for the long stocking, and the
picture of Snaggletooth ripping open the beds and the armchairs, and
sitting on the floor with his hair full of feathers; then on to my
father's burial, and my illness, and the removal farther and farther
away from our native town until we found ourselves in London--scarcely
anything, except what was painful, was left unspoken of.
'And there's an end to it all, mother,' I said, when we had brought
the reminiscences up to the very night upon which we were conversing.
'No, my dear,' she replied, with a tender shake of her head, not an
end; there are brighter pages to come in my darling's life.'
'Do you know, mother,' I said, as I stood by her side at the door of
her bedroom, 'I have often thought of grandmother's long stocking, and
fancied that one day we should find a treasure somewhere.'
My mother laughed.
'Why, my dear, where on earth would you look for it? We have not a
thing left that belonged to your grandmother.'
'Yes, we have; you don't forget that brown monkey-man that used to
stand on the mantelshelf and wag its head at us?'
'I remember it perfectly, dear child; you don't mean to say you have
kept it all this time?'
'It is in my box now; I shall take it out to-night, and have a look at
it.'
'You don't suppose the treasure is in that?' said my mother, laughing.
'No; though Jessie and I did think one day that we had made a
discovery. Good-night, mother.'
'Good-night, dear child, and God bless you. Remember, my dear, there
are brighter days to come, and your mother will live to see them.'
That, before she went to sleep, she prayed for those brighter days, I
was certain, but I scarcely dared to hope that what she so fondly
desired would ever take place.
Before I went to bed I took from my box the stone image of the brown
monkey-man; it was at the very bottom of my box, which I had not
opened for many months, for the reason that it contained all the
sketches I had made of Jessie, and which I had put away when I lost
her. But for these, and the tender thought which they excited, I
should have given more attention to the stone image which looked
uglier and more repulsive than ever. How such a hideous thing could be
considered an ornament it puzzled me to think; but it occurred to me
that there were more flagrant violations of art than this. On the
previous day I had seen a ghastly death's-head pin in the cravat of a
coxcomb, who seemed very proud of it. I set the image of the
monkey-man on the mantelshelf, and slowly replaced the sketches in my
box, lingering over them with fond regret.
Among them I found a sketch with the name of 'Anthony Bullpit' at the
foot, and I remembered that it was a fancy drawing I had made of my
grandmother's lover, after reading the account of his arrest by the
detective Vinnicombe, elsewhere narrated; a sneaking figure was
Anthony Bullpit, as I had represented him, with his hang-dog look and
hypocritical face, gnawing at his finger-nails. I pushed it out of
sight, and turned again to the contemplation of my sketches of Jessie,
over which I spent a sad and tender quarter of an hour. Then, with a
sigh, I closed the box and locked it, and went to bed. It was my habit
of a night to lie awake for a few minutes with the candle alight on a
chair close to my bed. Generally I passed these minutes in reading,
but on this night 'I lay a-thynkinge,' and did not open my book.
Directly opposite the head of my bed was the mantelshelf, with the
smoke-dried monkey of a man in stone on it, and this was the last
thing that presented itself to my sight before I blew out the light.
Restless as I was with the events of the evening, and with the
conversation which had taken place between my mother and myself, I was
tired enough to fall asleep within a very few moments. But I was not
too tired to dream; my body was asleep, but my imagination was never
more active. To me, the most wonderful feature in the physiology of
dreams has always been the fact that Time, the dominant and inexorable
tyrant which rules and guides our course, and regulates the passions
and emotions of life, is in our sleep utterly set at naught; a
lifetime is compressed in a moment, as it were, and between waking and
sleeping a hundred years of history are played out. I think I must
have dreamt of every important event in my life, and of many in the
lives of others; they presented themselves to me without coherence or
sequence, and there was but one consistent feature in my fancies--the
figure of the monkey-man, which was never absent. I dreamt of
Snaggletooth and Snaggletooth's wife. She was relating the stories of
the Cock-lane Ghost and Old Mother Shipton, as she had related them in
the kitchen on the night my father lay dying upstairs, but in my
dream she was not speaking to me, but to the monkey-image, which
gravely wagged its head at her as she proceeded; Snaggletooth was
running up and down the stairs, and poking in the oddest corners, in
his search for the long stocking, and the monkey-man was assisting him
frantically, running at his heels, and tearing things open with
fiendish haste; I was in the mourning coach, following my father's
body to the churchyard, and the monkey-man was sitting opposite to me,
grinning at me; Snaggletooth was carrying me out of the churchyard,
and as I opened my eyes, the monkey-man, squatting on Snaggletooth's
shoulder, squinted at me. In the same way the image presented itself
in every incident connected with Jessie and my mother and uncle Bryan;
and when I lay trembling in bed, and Jane Painter stood in my bedroom
in the dark telling me stories of blood and murder, the monkey-man
prowled about the floor, and dropped from the ceiling, and crept from
under my bed, and sat on my pillow with its ugly face illumined. When
Jessie knocked at the shop-door, as she had done years ago for the
first time, and my mother opened it, the monkey-man entered first, and
jumped on to the table; and on the night of the amateur performance at
Josey West's the monkey-man was among the audience, seated in a place
of honour. Suddenly all this chaos of persons and circumstances came
to an end, and there were only my grandmother, and I, and the
monkey-figure sitting together. I was in my little low chair, my
grandmother, very stately and grand, was in her armchair, and the
monkey-man was on the mantelshelf. Said my grandmother in my dream, in
a very distinct tone, 'He had a knob on the top of his head, and was
always eating his nails.' I looked at the monkey-man for confirmation
of her words, and it said, in a stony voice, 'He had a knob on the top
of his head, and was always eating his nails.' After this
confirmation, my grandmother continued, 'And the last time I set eyes
on him was on my wedding-day.' Again I looked at the monkey-man, and
again it confirmed my grandmother's statement, but with a slight
difference this time, 'And the last time we set eyes on him was on our
wedding-day.' Which inference on the part of the monkey-man of being
my grandfather somewhat disturbed me. Now, at this point of my
fancies, what on earth brought old Mac, the actor, into the scene?
There he was, however, face to face with the monkey-man, who
questioned him as a lawyer would have done. 'What do you say his name
commences with?' asked the monkey-man? 'It commences with a G,'
replied old Mac. 'And what is that habit of his that you say is a sign
of ill-temper?' asked the monkey-man. 'Biting his nails,' replied old
Mac; 'he is always at it.' By this time my dream has resolved itself
into a court of inquiry; the monkey-man is dressed in a wig and gown,
which do not hide his ugliness; my grandmother, very broad and portly,
sits as judge, and I, it seems, am in some way the criminal whose case
is being tried, for my grandmother nods her head at me continually,
and says, 'Perhaps you will believe me now; all these things happened
on my wedding-day.' Old Mac fades away, and is replaced by Turk West.
'Curse all professional moneylenders, I say,' he cries; 'and if ever
I believe again in a man with a handle on the top of his head, my
name's not Turk West' 'Hold your tongue,' calls out the monkey-man;
'who wants to know what your name is? We'll come to names presently.
'When did you first discover the handle?' It isn't a handle,' says
Turk, in correction, 'it's a knob.' My grandmother nods in
confirmation. 'He had a knob on the top of his head,' she says, 'and
he was always biting his nails.' 'I don't know about that,' says Turk,
'but his fingers are always at his moustache, and he is the soul of
honour and comes from a highly-respectable family.' 'That he does,'
adds my grandmother. 'Poor Anthony! He proposed and wished to run away
with me, but my family stepped in and prevented him.' 'Very wrong,'
says Turk gravely; 'wasn't his family respectable enough for them? The
soul of honour!' 'Quite so,' says my grandmother. 'He told me, after I
had accepted this child's grandfather' (at this point of my dream I
become suddenly a child, in a pinafore), 'that life was valueless to
him without me, and that as he had lost me, he would be sure to go to
the devil.' 'Did he go?' asks the monkey-man. 'I always found him a
man of his word,' replies my grandmother. 'Now attend to me, sir,'
cries the monkey-man, in a bullying tone, turning suddenly upon Turk;
'when did you say you first discovered this knob?' 'Last week,'
replies Turk, 'when he sat in that chair' (the chair comes into the
dream) 'and told me to shampoo him.' 'You were surprised when you felt
it?' asks the monkey-man. 'I was,' says Turk, 'and I asked him if he
had knocked his head against something. He said, no, that he was born
with it.' 'And what was the remark,' continues the monkey-man,
levelling a threatening finger at me, 'you made to the prisoner at the
bar?' 'I said,' says Turk, 'that that sort of thing runs in families,
and that if he had it, his father must have had it before him.'
Suddenly, and as if it were quite in the natural order of things, we
are all listening to the statement of a new witness who has risen in
Turk's place. 'I am an officer in the detective force, and my name is
Vinnicombe. From information received, I went to Liverpool, and
tracked Anthony Bullpit on board the Prairie Bird, bound for America.
"It's no use making a noise about it," I says to him, as I slipped the
handcuffs on him; "I want you, Anthony Bullpit. You sha'n't be done
out of a voyage across the sea, but Botany Bay's the place as'll suit
you best, I should think." Here my grandmother brindles up, 'You're an
infamous designing creature,' she screams. 'He is no more guilty than
I am.' 'He pleads guilty at all events,' is the detective's reply.
'That is to spite me,' says my grandmother, 'and to prove that he's a
man of his word.' Then, by quite an easy transition, the court and the
crowd fade away, and my grandmother, I, and the monkey-figure are
again in the little parlour, and she is saying to me, 'Your
grandfather has much to answer for, child. Mr. Bullpit was transported
for twenty-one years. Some wicked people said it was a mercy he wasn't
hanged. If he had been, I should never have survived it. Poor
Anthony!' 'You would like to have a peep at him, I daresay,' says the
monkey-man to me, my grandmother having disappeared; 'come along, I'll
show him to you.' And in the same moment we are peeping through the
keyhole of Turk West's shop-door at the figure of Mr. Glover, who sits
in the chair with his fingers at his lips. Here a sudden movement or
noise partially awakes me.
With all the details of this strange dream in my mind I lay for a few
moments half asleep and half awake, endeavouring to bring the confused
particulars into some kind of order; but the only thing that was clear
to me was the connection that had been created between Anthony Bullpit
and Mr. Glover. As I gradually returned to full consciousness, this
connection seemed to become something more than a fancy. That the knob
on Anthony Bullpit's head, of which I heard so much from my
grandmother's lips in my young days, was reproduced, according to Turk
West's testimony, on the head of Mr. Glover, was certainly no fancy;
Anthony Bullpit bit his nails; Mr. Glover had the same objectionable
habit. Stranger discoveries were made every day than the discovery
that Mr. Glover was Anthony Bullpit's son. If this were so, what
became of Mr. Glover's boast that there was not a stain upon his good
name, and that his character and the character of all his family were
above reproach? It occurred to me here that his ardent desire to make
people believe this sprang from the fact that he had something
disreputable to conceal. What made me so anxious in the matter was,
that if there were a solid foundation to the suspicion, and if I could
prove a connection between Mr. Glover and Anthony Bullpit the convict,
then I had a lever in my hands which I could use to good effect
against Mr. Glover--a lever which I believed would cause him at once
to cease his attentions to Jessie. That he had laid her under an
obligation to him was evident, and he might be inclined to persecute
her in consequence. The lever I speak of was the printed account by
Vinnicombe, the detective, of the arrest and conviction of Anthony
Bullpit for the robbery from the bank.
I rose and lit the candle, and taking the mouldy old paper from the
hollow of the stone monkey-figure, I read it carefully. I was
particularly struck in the reading by the description given by the
detective of the peculiarity in Anthony Bullpit's teeth. If that
peculiarity existed in the teeth of Mr. Glover, it would be almost
impossible to resist the conviction that he was Anthony Bullpit's son.
I set to work at once, and made a fair copy of the 'Remarkable
Discovery of a Forger by the Celebrated Detective, Mr. Vinnicombe.' At
nine o'clock in the morning I was in Turk West's shop, with the
manuscript in my pocket.